I think I've found my answer at last, Houdini beta has arrived for Mac, and It's pretty cool. Perhaps finally I can render particles in the way I've been imagining for years now. Already I have enough particles in the Viewport to look like a solid surface, and it handles it very fast once the calculations are done. Finally the calculations on the particles take more time than the actual display of them, the way it should be.

This program sure could take a long time to learn though, it has such depth, could take years!

Thats 250,000 Particles, I seem to remember Cinema giving up at around 10,000

:-P

The above Movie (See Link) is something I've tried to do in various 3D programs and have never been able to do till today in Houdini!

I bought it from Apple refurb so t was discounting to begin with by a nice amount. Then on top of that I found out from Apple that I a user customized the machine by building to order, such as adding more RAM, it will have those addons for free but no way of knowing. A Rather awesome lucky dip in a way.

And low and behold, it came with 250gb more HD space and a better Graphics Card, the Nvidia 8800 which is $140 / £70 more I think and if it hadn't came with it I was going to go purchase it myself, Id bought it praying that it would come with that card. And to make things even better Apple said it would ship in 2 weeks, but it arrived but days later on my Birthday of all days!

The only feeling of sadness around the machine is I wanted a 3ghz Mac, just cus of the significance of the wholesome number 3 versus 2.8. That and my old G5 was a 2.7ghz chip,so moving from 2.7 to 2.8 seemed a bit lame, despite the fact that this Intel 2.8 actually performs as fast as 2 x 2.7ghz G5 chips (really)

But even that issue has been solved as a few days ago ZDNet released an over clocking tool for MacPro's and mycomputer is now a dizzying 3.1ghz x 8 Cores instead of 2.8ghz

I've also just added some more ram bringing it to a savory 6gb in total. This thing screams, the graphics card is amazingly fast (for games at least under Windows) and chews up anything I throw at it and asks for more please.

The only thing that upsets it is Crysis on ULTRA amazing OMG settings. And It's still playable which is outstanding given how lick-ably gorgeous that game is:

This new computer benchmarks with Vray a whole 6 to 7.5x faster than my Dual 2.7ghz G5 it replaced. And the Graphics card is 3-4 faster at least on basic polygonal models.

The only problem with it now is I find myself in Windows more than Mac (playing games) and that Windows is more disgusting vile and temperamental that id previously thought. Any crash (and you'll have many) can potentially ruin your partition or require a reinstall of the OS. And a reinstall of the OS is a BIG deal unlike Mac. Reinstalling not only takes ages but require you to nanny it thru each step as it periodically find ways to interrupt and ask you questions it could'nt wait till the end to ask. And worse, much worse than that is you have to reinstall EVERYTHING, as all your settings, all your installed programs are severely tied to the installation of Windows itself unlike Mac. It took my around 15 minutes to transfer my entire old comuter to my new one with all my Applications and settings working and intact. The only exception being server stuff like Apache installs and Adobe software cus they also employ an evil Windows like registry system that also.. just like Windows seemingly breaks and require

Just paying in Photoshop again, I haven't really used for a year at least, not for anything creative anyway.

Not sure what it is yet, I do know It's not finished though.Though I suppose an artist never really finishes their work, they merely abandon it.
And yes It's extremely girly. Started out with the idea of just creating some ornate backdrop for something. This is one hour in:

Also redone the whole RSS/XML feed. Hopefully It's all good now. It will work in conjunction with Tags and stuff. Will now have clickable images, and well.. all the stuff the HTML version has been enjoying.

I've also redesigned the page to have a fixed width and a subtle drop shadow via CSS 3. It's also using a Max-width feature of CSS 3.

I just made the realization that all the available mac graphics cards literally are defunct PC ones. Take for instance the upcoming Radeon 3870 that's finally arriving on Mac... great you say but the new 4870 for PC is coming out at the same time almost. And the difference in speed between them is well.. incompressible?

Any surplus graphics cards for PC floating around, hey get rid of them on mac users, where low end cards are still competitive.